Superhero parents

I've got another confession today.

I'm a mom. I like being a mother. Some of my best friends are mothers.

But I have never been fond of superhero mothers. Or fathers, where they're given a lot of "on screen" parenting time (usually this means single parent or stay-at-home).

This made more sense when I was younger, before I was a parent--in theory I probably wouldn't find superhero parents relatable because I wasn't a parent. But I am a parent now and I still don't find them relatable.

I don't think that I think there's anything wrong with the concept, or that I think that parents shouldn't be superheroes.

But I've never been interested in superhero moms or dads. Sue Richards? Not interesting. Scott Lang? Only potentially interesting when the story isn't Cassie-focused. Black Canary? Interesting until she decided to be more of a mom, then not interesting.

(Please not that I'm not saying that becoming a parent necessarily makes a character less interesting, I'm saying that it makes them less interesting to me. It's a personal thing.)

And it's not because where there are parents, there are children. I have nothing against children (although I'm not much of a "kid person"--I like my own kids, but tend not to seek out other children). I have nothing against children in comics--I like stories about kid heroes well enough. I have an interest in kid sidekicks, although I find that they usually work out better in theory than in presentation, but I expect that that's got more to do with my 21st-century sensibilities (the idea that you just don't intentionally put a child in danger for any reason) than anything else. Although the non-super children of superheroes generally don't interest me much, and they get captured by villains almost as often as sidekicks do.

Okay, that was a detour. Because it's not really the kids. And it's not really the danger to the kids, I'm not that sensitive to fictional emperilment.

But there is a level of responsibility to being a parent that--when I see a superhero parent--sucks the escapism right out of it for me. Some of the "fun" goes away. And it's not the whole "if Captain Blackberry dies, his children will be orphans!" thing. It's that when he gets home from beating on the Evil Horde, he still has to decide what to make for dinner, make dinner, help with homework, bathe the baby, get up at 3 in the morning when the baby comes down with an ear infection, and do all the work for his day job that he missed during the battle.

Sure it's realistic. Sure it's (theoretically) relatable. But I don't particularly want to see it in my comic books.